Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Desmond. I thank the hon. Member for Harpenden and Berkhamsted (Victoria Collins) for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my favourite topics—public transport, or the lack thereof.
As other rural MPs in the room will know, improving local transport links is a never-ending discussion, particularly in a constituency such as North West Leicestershire that only has a bus service to rely on. We have no passenger rail at all, so everybody needs to travel by road.
Off the back off 14 years of austerity forced upon us by the coalition and then the previous Conservative Government, we need to consider the context that our community has been growing throughout that time. Alongside the destruction of our public services, libraries, Sure Starts and day services, our public transport was cut by 62%.
Planning developments and local transport are about understanding the population we have, as well as the future population. When talking about planning, we have to consider the impact, particularly in my constituency, of huge shed expansion in the industrial sector.
I speak to local residents in Heather regularly, a village in North West Leicestershire. They are just a stone’s throw away from Ibstock, a developing town. Many have told me that when they first moved to Heather, they did not need to use public transport regularly, but knowing they could get a bus meant they had a service they could rely on. Now, as they are getting older, their needs have changed, but the public transport in Heather is long gone. Demand fluctuates, but we are not evaluating that quickly enough or planning for the long term, so when the demography of a town or an estate changes, we are reliant on the community fighting for themselves to get services in place, rather than bus services reflecting the needs of that changing community.
When we talk about connecting new housing developments to leisure, jobs, education, medical and other services, the context is that we have so many fewer services than we had 15 years ago. Context is important in these transport conversations. Planning for change and growth is at the very core of what we are discussing. In fact, planning a new housing estate feels so much more straightforward when the numbers needed to create a new school or doctor’s surgery are taken into consideration. It might not be easy, but we understand the maths that sits behind it. However, when it comes to public transport, it is much less cohesive. It seems a complete waste that public transport is lagging behind in a much more piecemeal discussion. We are not planning for change; we are responding to it, and that is very frustrating for our local communities.
We had a newish development in my community that already involved the enhancement of a new school and the opportunity to extend the doctor’s surgery. As part of the planning conditions, residents were given a six-month bus pass, but it is of little use: there are no buses, so what is the point? We are not getting true, seamless connection between our new developments and our towns. Our towns need those new communities to survive and thrive. Any building in existing town centres does not create good connectivity and extra footfall. It actually means an impairment to growth. Quite often, the bus network does not serve newer estates that sit just outside our town centres, which means that residents are cut off from the town centre, and the town centre is cut off from them. They simply never visit. Therefore, the opportunity to help our town centres is lost. I was proud to sit on the Bus Services Bill Committee, and the Government’s commitment to get more money to local authorities for public transport is clear. However, the difficult part of that is trying to ensure that the money is actually being best utilised, as we are not planning for change; we are reacting to it.
There needs to be a better link between where people live and where services are required. We are never going to be able to plan for everything, but I would like to hear the Minister’s view on how bus services in the long term can be a vehicle for growth and create clearer community connections.